


Times That Try

by i_claudia



Category: Merlin (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Historical, American Revolution, Character Death, Dark, M/M, Prisoner of War, Soldiers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-06-26
Updated: 2010-06-26
Packaged: 2017-11-05 21:22:21
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,547
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/411156
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_claudia/pseuds/i_claudia
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They are strangers, enemies. Even brothers can forget each other after too much blood has been spilt between them.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Times That Try

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for the kinkmeme and posted on LJ [here](http://i-claudia.livejournal.com/53830.html). (26 June 2010)

He is sick of war, sick of the smoke and the stench of it: gunpowder and stale blood and death. He is sick of the choking forests they fight in, this miserable wilderness where every tree hides a rebel with murder in his heart and a musket in his hand, sick of the damp and the snow and the orders to slog through it all, struggling forward through marshes with mud up to his knees and brambles tearing at his arms, biting deep into his uniform to get at the skin underneath. He hates the colonies, has always hated them, with a slow, smouldering resentment that’s lain dormant for years, just waiting for something to feed the flames. He wants nothing more than to leave, to shed the red jacket, shuck the musket and bayonet and polished buttons of this soldier he’s become like a second skin and go – but where would he turn?

The home he came from is no home anymore; its green pastures have held no pleasure for him for ten years now.

There are fewer prisoners today than yesterday. Dead from rotten wounds, maybe. More likely they’ve been sent to the prison ships already, locked in floating coffins to wait for a death that comes before its time but never quickly enough.

*

“Where are you from?”

He fumbles with surprise, nearly drops the water and husk of wormy bread he holds. The soldier who’d spoken is young, an officer, entitled to a better meal than this food which is more mold than anything else. His shoulders are square in his homespun uniform. His hair is bright against the murky darkness, the bold burnished yellow of August fields. 

The world tilts.

*

He is fifteen and intoxicated with it, full of the flush of youth and the immortality it brings, the quick brash anger of the invincible. He is fifteen and nothing is out of reach until reality comes marching rudely in.

“You can’t go.”

“I have to. My father—”

“To hell with him.” The words feel hot, brutally heady as they fall from his tongue. “Stay.”

“I’ll write.”

“You won’t.”

It comes to this: 

A coach with a father and son quietly exiting a life with nothing more than the clothes they wear. Everything else has gone ahead, waits in wooden boxes across an ocean for them to rebuild with, far from the jealousy of a suspicious king.

They leave nothing for him, none of the familiar objects he’s built his life around. A new family fills the spaces of the house. Tenants, he thinks scornfully, who will never know what sparked the argument that ended in the scrapes they paint over in the drawing room.

*

The officer is still there the next day, and he wonders why. This is a major at least, who has rights to better lodging than he himself gets, yet here the man sits among his men, shivering in the wet, eyes burning in his face.

“Why are you here? You were always a pacifist.”

He doesn’t answer. He can see his silence makes the officer angry, and feels a vicious pleasure warm his belly. They are strangers, enemies. Even brothers can forget each other after too much blood has been spilt between them. He leaves the bread and water and turns his back, turns back to the comfort of the known.

*

He hadn’t had a choice, not that he’d wanted one. He’d signed his name and taken the musket and uniform willingly, grabbed the chance to leave the ghosts and memories behind. _This is the tree we climbed as children; here is the stable where they taught you to ride. This is the stall where we learned to kiss, mouths hot and eager, hesitance shifting into fervor in the slide of our tongues; here we learned what our bodies were for._

It’s easier to live in a world without choices, a world where all he has to do is follow orders and keep his head down. He’d cared at first, flinched when the man next to him stumbled and fell into his shoulder, eyes staring at nothing and a darker stain blossoming against his scarlet breast. He’d learned not to care, to shut that part of himself off, amputate it like the limbs that pile up outside the surgeon’s tent.

Everything is red here, crimson and carnelian. The trees are on fire with it until the snow douses them to brown cloaked in white; when the clear, cold ice settles in they follow ruby footprints in the snow. Washington cannot give the rebel soldiers shoes, and they leave the marks of it behind them, a price taken in blood like so many things in this living hell.

He looks at the prints, observes them from what feels like a very long distance, admires the contrast in the picture. His own boots are worn, broken. He’s had to cut slits in the sides so that his feet will fit in them, and the snow works its way in until his toes are numb, white as the snow.

*

It’s less than a week before all the prisoners except the officer are dead. There’s no food for them; they can’t afford to waste it on rebels, traitors all. But there are rules about officers, and Lord Tristan sends a ransom demand: they’ll trade this Yankee major for a British lieutenant colonel taken in the fall. The rumours all say that Washington has his eye on this particular officer, that he might even have command of a regiment before spring.

He sees the papers. It’s the first time in a decade he’s seen that name written down. He brushes his fingers across it, moves his lips in the form of the words, but he doesn’t voice it, afraid that to speak might break whatever spell this is, might destroy whatever chance they have left.

He watches the officer that evening, though there’s no food to give. The man is silent, drawn in on himself, lines graven deep along the sculpted contours of his face. He is the only one in the enclosure, but he sits hunched in on himself, knees and elbows drawn close as if he’s in a crowded room. Maybe he is – there’s a bandage on his thigh, thick with mud and shit and the rust of dried blood, and it wouldn’t be the first time he’s seen a wound drive a man to madness.

One look is enough to see that the officer is defeated, and to see that breaks something inside him. This is a man who should never be conquered. He opens his mouth, feels the words scrape along his throat, the sound of them heavy and strange in his mouth. He hasn’t spoken for so long, too afraid the words will expose some deep, private place, let loose something that should stay locked up.

“Why did you join?” He wants to ask _Why were you caught?_ but the words twist on themselves in his chest.

The officer looks up, surprised. He wonders if the man had even realized he was there.

“Why did I join?”

“Yes.” The rebel army is all volunteer; he wants to know what would drive a man like this to take up arms.

“For dignity. For liberty. For the right to live my own life.”

He looks at the man for a long moment before leaving, strangely disappointed.

He’s back later that night, slipping out of the darkness with half his daily rations, wanting more, wanting a deeper why.

The officer accepts the food without thanks, but after both of them sit in silence, unmoving, he begins to speak.

“I worked at a newspaper. My father would have locked me in a root cellar if he’d known. But things were happening; I wanted to know what they were, why they were. I wanted to know the men doing them, wanted to know how they burned so brightly with their belief, why their words caught fire in men’s hearts. I had no great love for this land, but I had less for the country I’d left, and when the choice was liberty or death I knew which one I wanted.

“I started in the 21st Continental. Massachusetts. We were all too young, too naïve; we joined the militia and became the army. None of us knew hell was waiting for us; we marched forward, marched through it with fife and drum and imagined cheers ringing out around us. We went to Boston, fought and bled and died for the city we’d come to hate and love, the city of rebellion and massacre, every emotion taken to extreme in its narrow streets. We left a trail of bodies through Dorchester until we drove the redcoats to their ships. We moved on to other battles with the stink of powder and victory to drive us onward.”

The officer talks on as the night grows long behind them, and he listens to every word, seeing the picture painted for him clear against the dark of the moonless winter. Failure, loss; the helpless fury that comes with being pushed back three steps for every one taken forward. And then: Trenton. Saratoga. He doesn’t need the officer to tell him what happened in New Jersey, the carnage wreaked on Christmas Eve, on men sleeping off a celebration, but he listens anyway, listens as the man speaks of Washington. _The General_ , he calls him, and his voice goes almost reverent.

He doesn’t want the officer to speak about Washington, about principles or causes, about belief. He doesn’t know what belief is anymore, and he stares hard at the officer, searching for the source of the spark, the determination that grows again inside his face as he speaks of the surprise flush of victory. This man thrives on the war that’s sucking his own life away; even in this charnel house the officer can see the thin, pale light of future.

He can’t remember the last time he felt any kind of light.

*

When the officer finishes, there are a hundred questions; he only asks one, the least important.

“Your father?”

“Dead since before the war. Yellow fever.”

They don’t speak anymore that night, but he stays and watches the officer, searching out familiarities, discovering new darknesses in his face and the folded fingers of his hands.

*

Rot finds the officer’s wound, and still there is no response to the demand for a prisoner exchange. Lord Tristan is losing patience, although it wouldn’t be the first time a message had gone astray. The very woods themselves eat messengers here.

He steals from the surgeon’s tent. There’s precious little worth taking, but he finds clear liquor in a bottle hidden deep in a chest and takes that, hides it close to his body until he can make his way back to the officer. He pours it down the man’s throat and on his thigh, wrapping the dirty bandage back around it to hide the festering infection.

He apologizes for the food he’s brought – the only bread he’d found is riddled with weevils – but the officer only laughs and tells him about the terrible dark months of Valley Forge, about men boiling leather because they had nothing else to eat. 

Neither of them voice the knowledge that it doesn’t matter now anyway, that the officer’s fate was sealed when the first sign of rot appeared, streaks of black and green against red flesh. 

*

The officer is delusional, seeing dreams with waking eyes and speaking to him as if he were a hundred different people. The man is never still anymore, this man who had always been calm, poised; now the wound drives him to tremors and a constant shifting of his limbs.

He knows they don’t have long, and the knowledge makes him angry; he feels the heat of it, dangerous under the cover of ice he’s built around himself. The world has taken so much and still it finds new, more precious things to steal from him. 

He’d taken the key to the enclosure long before, and he uses it now to let himself in, closes the heavy gate behind him. The officer looks at him with fever eyes, too bright; the gaze makes him uncomfortable. He lays a hand on the officer’s chest, feels the heart there beating too fast, feels a surge of anger, of fury that time has always moved too fast for them.

“What are you—”

“Hush,” he says, and then again: “Hush.”

The officer never looks away from him. “Come here.”

He goes, surprised by how familiar this feels: this body pressed against his own; this mouth a hot slide against his lips; these hands burning as they search out the hidden places of his soul. He holds on tightly, digs his fingers deep, as if by doing that he can anchor them here, keep them from sliding forward and apart by the pressure of his hands, the ragged catching of his nails on cloth and skin.

They come together easily, one body joined in motion. The officer’s good leg wraps tight around his hips, connecting them; their mouths are messy, pressed together in an exchange of breath, of unspoken words. 

The officer groans, a primal sound wrenched from somewhere deep in the hidden well of his body. It makes him gasp in turn, quickens the blood rushing through him, and above the rising tide he hears his name, no more than a breath mouthed hot against his shoulder.

“No,” he says desperately, too late, and takes the officer’s mouth in a punishing kiss, forcing his way in deep as if that will let him find the name, erase it from the air. Names and words get in the way, break whatever spell this is – he wants only this, only the pureness of motion, of the press and slide driving him further along toward urgency.

But the officer arches beneath him, shuddering through release, and his lips breathe out the name again: a prayer.

There are hands wound tight in his hair, a body squeezing tight around him. He can feel the musket still slung across his back, the bayonet hanging from his loosened belt. It’s cold and clean in his hand, such a contrast to this man under him, all fever-heat and damp breath, the bandage a dull red where the wound has opened again. 

He thrusts, skin rippling with tremors as he cries out, fixing this moment, pinning it as easily as the moths he’d caught and collected as a child, saving them from the rushing cruelty of time. When it’s done, when the officer is finally quiet and still under him, he leans down close and whispers one word, releasing it back into the warm ear of its master.

_Arthur_.

*

It comes to this:

A man running, dark hair and bright coat silhouetted clearly against the rising dawn. The crack of a single shot. Another. He spins, falls, hands flying out as if to catch the ruby drops scattering from him, glinting bright in the cold morning sun. 

A man in the snow, coat crimson to match the scarlet stains on the white field he lies on, cold daylight growing brighter as the sun peers down without stopping its journey into the sky.


End file.
